Intel crowns PC king of home electronics
Chip giant rates the PC as best home entertainment device, but says complexity and price prevent greater acceptance
Intel has claimed that the PC has moved from its business roots to become the premier home entertainment centre, outperforming dedicated consumer electronic devices.
Speaking at the European Computer Trade Show in London last week, Ron Whittier, senior VP of Intel?s content group, said although the PC was seen as an integral part of the home, it was too expensive and complex, and lacked one killer application to make it a must-have for every household.
?The PC can do linear media on a par with any consumer entertainment device. But it can also do a whole spectrum of interactive entertainment as well,? he said. Despite the variety of entertainment available on a PC, vendors struggle to justify the price of a PC over other consumer devices.
?You have to have a good selling proposition ? a set of applications that are significantly better than prior platforms or unique to the new one,? he said.
In his speech, Whittier claimed that the visual computing performance of the average PC sold to consumers will increase tenfold in the next three years.
?Such statements are only more likely to make consumers wait three years and not buy now,? said one computer retailer attending the show.
?We have to find an application which overcomes that barrier of waiting for the next great thing,? said Whittier.
Meanwhile, market analysts predict that online gaming, currently a minority occupation, will involve over five million players and generate nearly $600 million for ISPs and other service vendors by 2001. Online services and entertainment were heavily promoted as the future destination of computer games, despite the fact that consumer expenditure on online gaming accounts for only one per cent of the $4.4 billion European games market.
The growing number of internet-connected homes ? Datamonitor predicts 38 million by 2001 in Western Europe alone ? is expected to fuel a boom in online interactive entertainment.
Demand for MMX buries Classic Pentium
Stocks of Intel Classic Pentium chips, canned three months ago, are beginning to dry up as retailers push customers towards MMX processors.
Luke Ireland, operations director at Evesham Micros, said: ?We aim at the more technical PC buyer and with the limited price difference we haven?t seen demand for the older chips.?
He claimed most customers realise that the only way to try to insure a PC against obsolescence was to buy the highest specification they could afford.
Ireland said corporates had less need than consumers for constant upgrades. He said consumer software, especially games, exerted a constant pressure on hardware, while most business software will run satisfactorily on a 166MHz chip.
But Mohammed Mawji, director of the PC division at Watford Electronics, said: ?We had to stop selling the Classics rather than wanted to.? He said the company?s Cyrix PC was continuing to sell well. He claimed that there was still a market for the older technology, although he conceded that the price difference was minimal.
An Intel representative conceded there were problems with supply, but said the company wanted people to go with the MMX chip.